I lived for a year in Arnhem when I was little, and spent a large part of my later childhood in a small village at the Dutch border near Eindhoven. Summers were spent in Holland proper, at the North Sea. Water or inland – these two places shared important attributes: they were as flat as flat can be, and they were washed in soft, ever changing light. These two things are connected – wind rushes across these flatlands and drives the clouds, big old clouds from the sea. They shade the landscape in ever-changing patterns, dark now and beaming with light a minute later.

 

 Jacob Isaacksz. van Ruisdael – Landscape in the evening with windmill – ca. 1650

I was maybe 12, during summer vacation, when I was allowed to venture out on a small boat, like a canoe, with an outboard motor all by myself, having convinced my host family that I was perfectly fit to do this, never mind I had never set foot in a boat. I proudly navigated a maze of small canals, actually outside of a city, I forget where it was. These were waterways historically used to transport turf. An exciting outing until the motor died. When I couldn’t get it going again, pulling the starter string 100 times in vain, I remember lying down in the boat deciding to wait for some other boat to pass by. In the meantime I looked up to a sky that seemed both beautiful and menacing at once, making me practically dizzy with the speed the clouds were racing. It was the first time that I consciously noted a quality of light. Eventually I gave up the hopeless wait and tried my luck again, this time succeeding and miraculously finding my way back to the harbor. Where I promptly fell into the cold water when trying to moor the boat. Another adventurous day in the life of Heuer. A day that shaped perception.

Jacob Isaacksz. van Ruisdael – Rough Sea ca. 1670

The quality of the light is often misty from all the moisture in the air, a softness that becomes the otherwise pretty monotonous landscape. There is endless grey, unless the sun is for once unimpeded and the sky turns blue, endless green and brown of the land snatched from the sea and used for agriculture, and canals and waterways behind the dykes that reflect the color of the sky, as does the sea in front of the polders.

Inland it becomes even more monochromatic – there is the sky and then there are those endless fields of oats and sugar beets, green rotting to brown eventually, interrupted only by alleys of poplars and the occasional hawthorn hedges, or a few stands of chestnuts.

https://www.nga.gov/features/slideshows/dutch-landscapes-and-seascapes-of-the-1600s.html#slide_1

Jacob Isaacksz. van Ruisdael – Landscape with ruined castle and a church ca. 1665

I have often thought that the preoccupations with tulips (as well as other, often exotic, flowers) originated in being starved for colors other than the muted ones inherent to the landscape. If you look at the still life paintings from the Golden Age, color rules all, down to the last glimmers and subtle hints of it in carefully painted reflections.

Given the commercial breeding of tulips as one of the major Dutch exports these days, the landscape, for a short time each year, undergoes this magical transformation into a riot of reds and oranges, purples and yellows, for acres and acres as far as the eye can see. But the sky looks the same, just as it did 400 years ago. And no one captured it better than Ruysdael and his pupil Hobbema. Well, maybe someone did, but I am just partial to these two during that epoch.

http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/old-masters/hobbema.htm

Meindert Hobbema – Landscape withWatermill ca. 1666

Meindert Hobbema – Kanaallandschap met vissershuisje